Today on the show, Allen spends the hour putting the summer’s street protests in historical context by looking at the political valence of riots over time with Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot.

Among other things, they talk about reclaiming the word “riot” as a response to state violence, the difference between strikes (the protest of the laborer) and riots (the protest of the excluded and dispossessed), how women have been at the forefront of riots for centuries, and what this all means for our current social and political moment in the ongoing fight for Black lives.

Suggested reading: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

Joshua Clover is a professor of comparative literature and critical theory at the University of California, Davis and an affiliate of the Mellon Research Initiative in Racial Capitalism. His most recent book is Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016), which was reissued in paperback last month.

Cover photo by ev on Unsplash